Metablog

This is just a notice that I might not be posting much this week, as I'm traveling out of town for some job interviews. The top 100 songs of the decade list will be updated on Friday (as usual), but there might not be any new posts before that.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (90-81)

(Click here for the whole list.)


90. Shout Out Louds — "Tonight I Have to Leave It"

The part where he says "Give love, give love…" sounds kind of like Queen's "Under Pressure" except played by the Cure.




89. Kate Havnevik — "New Day"

The vocals are simple, but the electronics in this song are amazing.




88. The Notwist — "Pilot"




87. Owen Pallet (formerly known as Final Fantasy) — "Song Song Song"




86. Sophie Ellis-Bextor — "Me and My Imagination"




85. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists — "Counting Down the Hours"




84. Kylie Minogue — "Can't Get You out of My Head"




A more dramatic version by the Flaming Lips:




83. Iron & Wine — "On Your Wings"




82. Uh Huh Her — "Not a Love Song"




81. Locksley — "Don't Make Me Wait"

(Full disclosure, I know them from high school.)

Defending Roman Polanski

In poetry.

The most reasonable conservative I've heard in a long time

Bruce Bartlett in this Bloggingheads video (embedded at the end of this post). He's plugging his new book, The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward.

Here are a few of the points he makes in the video (paraphrased, not direct quotes). These are hardly original, but they're refreshing to hear from a conservative (he worked in the Reagan and first Bush administrations):

1. America needs to raise taxes. Conservative leaders know this will eventually be necessary, and they're being brazenly irresponsible by fighting against tax increases for now.

2. The idea that cutting taxes raises government revenue is a conservative myth. So is the idea that you can "starve the beast," i.e., cut taxes so that government spends less and deficits shrink.

3. We have the least efficient health-care system in the developed world.

4. The United States should become more like Europe.

On that last point, he calls out conservatives in a way that needs to be done more often:

We're traveling down the route of Europe. And many Americans just hate that idea. If you're in any group of conservatives, and you say, "Oh, that will take us down the route of Europe," they will say, "Oh no, we don't want to do that! That's awful!" Nobody ever explains what's so terrible about Europe.

By the way, I'm not saying I agree with everything he says here. I'm not convinced by his main idea, the value added tax. On the other hand, Matthew Yglesias makes the liberal case for it.

The "Hottest Heads of State"

Here's a well-done list of the world's heads of state, in order of hotness.

It's interesting to look at some of the lower-ranked heads of state and try to detect the hallmarks of unattractiveness. Many of them look like the photos were taken with a fisheye lens or distorted with a Photoshop tool.

Not surprisingly, the photos of some of the higher-ranked heads of state seem chosen to be flattering. But I've always found that photo of President Obama strangely unflattering.

(Photo of Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed from Wikimedia Commons, by Mauroof Khaleel. Photo of Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko from the European Parliament's Flickr site, by Pietro Naj-Oleari.)

Anti-vegetarian argument #2: Tradition

In a discussion about vegetarians and Thanksgiving, an AskMetafilter commenter said this:

Food isn't just fuel - it's a whole lot of what symbolizes who you are and where you come from. One of the problems with giving up meat, especially if it's not by your own choice, is that you're giving up pieces of culture, heritage, family traditions, ties to your childhood memories, ties to the way your great grandma cooked for her children...

For some reason that's an aspect of vegetarianism that isn't often addressed.

More recently, in a personal essay in the current New York Times magazine, Jonathan Safran Foer says:

When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. ... We thought she was the greatest chef who ever lived. My brothers and I would tell her as much several times a meal. And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the greatest chef who ever lived would probably have more than one recipe (chicken with carrots), and that most great recipes involved more than two ingredients. ...

In fact, her chicken with carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God. ...

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. ... [M]y choice on their behalf means they will never eat their great-grandmother’s singular dish. They will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the greatest chef who ever lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.

That sounds like Foer basically agrees with the AskMetafilter commenter. But he has a second thought:

Or will it? It wasn’t until I became a parent that I understood my grandmother’s cooking. The greatest chef who ever lived wasn’t preparing food, but humans. ... [S]he would tell me about her escape from Europe [in World War II], the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn't. It was the story of her life -- "Listen to me," she would plead -- and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was. I know, now, what it was.

Foer explains the lesson at the end of the essay.

It's actually not the kind of essay that most appeals to me. I prefer to read writing that gets straight to the point instead of taking extra time to build up characters who gradually embody that point.

I also find it unfortunate that Foer puts down the role of "reason" in decision-making, saying that "stories" are more important. Of course, this is a self-serving view for a professional storyteller. But he himself relies on reason when he says:

A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit.

This isn't animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

But none of that gets to the heart of the "tradition" argument. I would argue that tradition simply isn't as important as numerous other factors -- but that's not likely to be satisfying to those who raise the tradition concern in the first place.

Perhaps it is better to use "stories" rather than "reason" to respond to that concern. That's what Foer does in this essay -- to chilling effect in the final section.

"No one in our family can ever say anything obvious."

A quote by "John Althouse Cohen, age 8, c. 1989."


UPDATE: A commenter responds:

The obvious thing is usually the most important thing.

Well, I thought that went without saying.

The only possible explanation why President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize

Ibrahim Assem, a man-on-the-street in Cairo interviewed by the New York Times, says:

"They are handing him the Nobel Peace Prize because he isn’t George Bush."

That's from the New York Times' roundup of reactions from around the world. See if you can tell which of those reactions are honest.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus says Obama should turn down the prize. Kaus has the right idea, and so do people writing for The New Republic and the Telegraph and Gawker and Metafilter and DailyKos -- and plenty of other bloggers.

UPDATE: Obama reacts: he's "surprised and deeply humbled." "To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformational figures who have been honored by this prize." "I will accept this award as a call to action." Though he stopped short of turning it down, the subtext -- that he hasn't yet accomplished enough to deserve this -- was clear. President Obama, you handled this awkward moment well.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (100-91)

Whatever you want to call the decade spanning 2000 to 2009 (the '00s, the aughts, the naughts), we're reaching the end of it. So it's time to take stock of the past 10 years by answering the question: What were the 100 best songs?

(Click here for the whole list.)

As far as this list is concerned, a "song" has to be sung. Instrumentals by Amon Tobin, Four Tet, Ratatat, and the Octopus Project might deserve to be mentioned in a discussion of the best music of the 2000s, but they won't be on this list.

Also, the original version of the song must have been released in 2000 or later — no covers of pre-2000 songs.

Here are some other people's lists:

Pitchfork's top 500 (to see the whole list without audio or Pitchfork's commentary, click here)

Summer Anne's top 125 (a personal, emotional list)

The Factual Opinion's top 100 + 100 runners-up (plenty of drum machines and subtle analysis)

Telegraph's top 100 (These aren't intended to be the best songs released in the past 10 years; they're the songs that "defined" the decade, dating as early as 1981)

50 Songs, 10 Years (with personal stories of how these songs affected the blogger)

NME's top 100

Largehearted Boy is keeping a meta-list of "best of the decade" music lists. (As well as song lists, there are also lists of the best albums, the best music videos, etc.)

Here we go…

100. The Shins — "Kissing the Lipless"

Possibly the silliest song title in the list.




99. Hanne Hukkelberg — "A Cheater's Armory "




98. The Polyphonic Spree — "Light and Day/Reach for the Sun"




97. Edith Frost — "Cars and Parties"

Here's a video of her lip-synching the song on a cable-access show (her words).




96. Bon Iver — "Skinny Love"

This song, along with the rest of the album it's on, emerged accidentally from a state of illness and hibernation in northern Wisconsin. (Wikipedia has the details.)




95. Björk — "It's Not up to You"




94. Jem — "They"




93.  The White Stripes — "Seven Nation Army"

Pure rock.




92. Noisettes — "Never Forget You"




91. St. Vincent — "Marry Me"

Summer Anne put this song on her list and said:

many of her songs, lyrically, are like little puzzles waiting for you to solve them. They are personal, seemingly, but also cryptic and distant. She doesn’t hit you over the head with anything. This song is the perfect example. The lyrics are perfectly poetic and, like good poetry, grow with meaning every time they are studied:

But you, you’re a rock with a heart like a socket

I can plug into at will

And will you guess when I come around next

I hope your open sign is blinking still

The Best Songs of the 2000s (2000-2009)

Here's my list of the best songs of 2000 to 2009!

91 - 100

81 - 90

71 - 80

61 - 70

51 - 60

41 - 50

31 - 40

21 - 30

11 - 20

TOP TEN

(plus 100 runners-up)

What was it all about?

UPDATE: I did the same thing 10 years later...

3 beautiful discarded things

Look.

Dumb inventions

Life Magazine has a gallery of 30 dumb inventions from the '50s and '60s. (Via Metafilter.)

Some are silly but seem harmless enough, like glowing tires:


Some, on the other hand, are disturbingly dangerous. Here's a couple carrying a baby while going ice skating:


Other risky inventions include the quick-draw robot, the cigarette-pack holder, and the suspended baby cage.

Sadly, one of the inventors was killed by his own invention -- the "birdman suit":


"Birdman Leo Valentin demonstrates his method of flying from a special harness. Valentin died when his invention failed him after jumping out of an airplane in 1956."

Penelope Trunk's Twitter post about miscarriage and abortion

Penelope Trunk said this on Twitter:

I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

The mainstream media has swarmed around that three-sentence comment about what's going on in one woman's life. Penelope Trunk is one of the more successful bloggers, but she's hardly a household name — so why has this caused a national furor?

Ann Althouse (my mom) says the tweet sets back the cause of abortion rights by undermining the perception that pregnant women are on a "serious search for meaning."

Maybe the real-world net result of this tweet will be bad for abortion rights, but I wish it weren't. People should be allowed to post something to Twitter that doesn't include, within the maximum 140 characters, an obligatory qualification about how they realize that abortion is a very serious and somber thing.

And women should be allowed to write honestly about abortions and miscarriages.

Is the problem that she's glad she ended up having a miscarriage rather than doing what she had been planning to do and get an abortion? Well, if that's surprising to people, then that itself is a serious problem that her Twitter post might go some way toward rectifying. Many, many people would prefer a miscarriage to an abortion.

Maybe you think she should have somehow drenched her statement in emotion. And maybe that would have been more effective. But it can often be more subtly effective to take an issue that's usually considered too taboo or tragic to speak about honestingly and -- speak about it honestly. (And let's also remember that this is a Twitter post we're talking about; it shouldn't be held to the same standards as a magazine article.)

Being told just the plain facts can be a more powerful reading experience. It puts more responsibility on you as the reader to do some of the thinking and evaluating instead of having everything prejudged by the author. Even if this doesn't happen to be your favorite kind of writing, it's not immoral for someone to use that style when writing about miscarriages or abortions.

Trunk has also written a blunt blog post about getting two abortions, and another one about being sexually abused. Like the Twitter post, these blog posts don't broadcast their own emotional or moral significance.

But I'm glad I've had the chance to read stark descriptions of distinctly female experiences that I, as a man, haven't had to endure. We'd be a little worse off if people like Trunk felt the need to censor themselves.

Runners-up for the best songs of the 2000s (blank post)

Here's my list of the best 100 songs of the decade

I've moved the runners-up to this post.

The movie scene I think of every time I hear the "brilliant filmmaker" defense of Roman Polanski

A memorable conversation from Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 movie Rope:

Rupert Cadell [Jimmy Stewart]: After all, murder is — or should be — an art. … And, as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals.

Brandon Shaw [John Dall]: And the victims — inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway!

Rupert Cadell: Obviously! Now, mind you, I don't hold with the extremists who feel that there should be open season for murder all year round. No, personally, I would prefer to have … "Cut a Throat Week" … or, uh, "Strangulation Day" …

I've seen many defenses of Polanski (see my previous post on two high-profile petitions for his release), and they typically argue that his greatness as a movie director makes it somehow wrong to imprison him upon his conviction for child rape.

Maybe they're right: Roman Polanski is a superior individual. Maybe his victim just didn't matter as much as he does.

Well, I really don't think so. But wait a minute — I could be wrong. After all, you and I might both be among the inferior beings. Maybe we should defer to those with more refined moral faculties.

Actually, I shouldn't even refer to what's "moral." It's a lowly concept, as you might remember from Brandon's speech in Rope:

The few who are privileged to commit murder … are those men of such intellectual and cultural superiority that they're above the traditional "moral" concepts. Good and evil, right and wrong, were invented for the ordinary, average man — the inferior man, because he needs them.

Likewise, the petition signed by over 70 movie-industry figures (including Martin Scorsese and David Lynch) doesn't dwell on the details of what Polanski actually did to the 13-year-old girl; it doesn't even refer to a victim at all. It tells you only what you need to know:

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

That's it — that's all the petition says about the nature of the allegations. Surely a mere case of morals doesn't provide a sufficient justification to punish a great man, does it?

Bernard-Henri Levy, Roman Polanski, and child rape

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has made this petition, signed by him, Salman Rushdie, and others:

Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.

He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings.

Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute-of-limitations in Europe.

This is in addition to a petition by over 70 major figures in the movie industry, including Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, and Woody Allen.

Bernard-Henri Levy's petition has already been thoroughly dissected by my mom -- who asks Levy why he, as a philosopher, would take this position. Another philosopher, A.C. Grayling, shows the right way to address the Polanski case as a philosophical issue.

As my mom points out, Levy's use of the word "plaintiff" should be noted and resisted. He uses "principal plaintiff" as a synonym for "rape victim."

As Grayling points out, references to the "statute of limitations" are irrelevant. Even if it applied to rape, the statute of limitations can't possibly apply to someone who's already been convicted, which Polanski has. All a statute of limitations can ever do is bar a prosecution (or lawsuit) from being brought against someone in the first place. It's based on the delay between the illegal act and the initiation of the court case; it has nothing to do with when he's actually punished.

That legal point is aside from the inequity of suggesting that the long lapse of time since Polanski's crimes should weigh in his favor, considering that Polanski himself caused the lapse by hiding from justice.

This must be pretty well-tilled soil at this point, but of course Polanski's artistic accomplishments have no bearing on how the legal system should treat him. Yet the petition signed by Scorsese flatly states: "It seems inadmissible ... that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him."

Polanski's defenders also point out that he's lost family members through the Holocaust and, unrelatedly, the Manson family. At least this observation, unlike the fact that he's made great movies, has some loose connection to a legal concept: some of his defenders have invoked "mitigating factors." But as with the statute of limitations, this argument is wrong both legally and morally. As a legal matter, mitigating factors can at most reduce a sentence; they don't transform a convicted felon to an innocent person.

Regardless, the fact that two very infamous groups of murderers have killed Polanski's loved ones is a horrible coincidence. But no one can explain why the notoriety of those killers should have any effect on what happens to Polanski now. All that's left, then, is that he's been extraordinarily burdened by traumatic deaths in his family. You could say the same of Vice President Joe Biden, but I don't think anyone wants to give him license to go on a crime spree.

I have a hard time fathoming what's going on in the minds of people like Bernard-Henri Levy. I assume they either don't have children or don't have empathy. What parents would accept leniency for a man who, at the age of 44, raped their 13-year-old daughter? (Or for that matter, their 13-year-old son, for it's hard to see how the gender could legitimately affect the legal outcome.)

Bernard-Henri Levy and Salman Rushdie might be considered top-tier public intellectuals, but they've failed to understand some basic facts about society. In order to have a functional society, we need for this to be the case: that if you rape a child, you are going to sleep in prison.

War photography and violence

This New York Times piece on war photographers taking photos of dead or mortally wounded American soldiers ends with a "wholly unexpected" comment from photographer Don McCullin:

“I feel I totally wasted a large part of my life following war. I get more pleasure photographing the landscape around my house in my twilight years.

"Have we learned any lessons from the countless pictures of pain and suffering? I don't think we’ve learned anything. Every year, there’s more war and suffering."

But is that last statement true? Steven Pinker wrote this essay saying it's actually the opposite:

Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. ...

Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution -- all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light. ...

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century. ...

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.

Since McCullin purported to base his view that war photography is futile or counterproductive on empirical evidence, I hope he'd change his view if presented with this contrary evidence. But it wouldn't be surprising if he didn't. People reflexively refer to any kind of social problem as an "increasing" problem, and this tendency seems to be more powerful than statistics. Pinker lists a few factors that cause people to make this mistake:

Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.

So, ironically, war photography itself feeds into the belief that war photography is ineffectual.

More from Pinker:

Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.

Pinker's essay only observes that there has been a decline; he doesn't try to explain it. He ends by saying:

With the knowledge that something has driven [violence] dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.

There's no way war photography could be the main answer to Pinker's question, since he's talking about a trend that's been underway since long before photography existed. But the fact that people are willing to look at the reality of war in vivid detail might have played a small role in the progress we've made.

Runners-up for the best songs of the first decade of the 2000s

As promised, I'm going to list the 100 greatest songs of the 2000s. But first, here are 100 runners-up, in no particular order…

(Click here for the whole list.) 


Goldfrapp — "Caravan Girl"



The New Pornographers — "My Rights Versus Yours" — WATCH

Grizzly Bear — "Southern Point" — LISTEN

The Weepies — "Nobody Knows Me at All" — WATCH

Solange — "I Decided" — WATCH

MGMT — "The Youth"— WATCH

Regina Spektor — "Better" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Title and Registration" – WATCH

Esperanza Spalding — "I Adore You" — LISTEN

Dirty Projectors — "Cannibal Resource" — LISTEN

Radiohead — "Everything in Its Right Place"



The Thrills — "One Horse Town" — WATCH

Rilo Kiley — "I Never" — LISTEN

Lady Gaga — "Paparazzi" — WATCH

The Postal Service — "Such Great Heights" — WATCH (cover by Iron & Wine)

Rufus Wainwright — "Shadows" — LISTEN

The Apples in Stereo — "Energy" — WATCH

Phoenix — "Lisztomania" — WATCH

of Montreal — "The Repudiated Immortals" — LISTEN

Yeah Yeah Yeahs — "Runaway" — WATCH

Hot Hot Heat — "Talk to Me, Dance with Me"



Elliott Smith — "Son of Sam" — WATCH

The Notwist — "One with the Freaks" — LISTEN

Black Eyed Peas — "Boom Boom Pow" — WATCH

Alicia Keys — "Karma" — WATCH

Dido — "White Flag" — WATCH

The Dodos — "God?" — LISTEN

Spoon — "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Tiny Vessels" — LISTEN

Lali Puna — "Small Things" — LISTEN

The Bird and the Bee — "Love Letter from Japan"



St. Vincent — "Your Lips are Red" — WATCH

Radiohead — "2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm.)" — WATCH

Iron & Wine — "Boy with a Coin" — WATCH

Clue to Kalo — "Seconds When It’s Minutes" — LISTEN

Herbert (feat. Dani Siciliano & Shingai Shoniwa) — "The Audience" — WATCH

Sufjan Stevens — "All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!" — LISTEN

Christina Aguilera — "Beautiful" — WATCH

Bosque Brown — "White Dove" — LISTEN

Yeasayer — "2080" — LISTEN

The Dresden Dolls — "Good Day"



Modest Mouse — "Float On" — WATCH

Arcade Fire — "My Body Is a Cage" — LISTEN

Hanne Hukkelberg — "Ease" — LISTEN

Styrofoam (feat. Ben Gibbard) — "Couches in Alleys" — LISTEN

The Go! Team — "Ladyflash" — WATCH

Monsters Are Waiting — "Crazy Love" — LISTEN

1990s — "See You at the Lights" — LISTEN

Wilco — "I'm the Man Who Loves You" — WATCH

John Mayer — "Daughters" — WATCH

Camera Obscura — "Let’s Get Out of This Country"



The Shins — "New Slang" — WATCH

Psapp — "Hi" — WATCH

Cut Copy — "Feel the Love" — LISTEN 

Amerie — "1 Thing" — WATCH

David Byrne & Brian Eno — "Strange Overtones" — WATCH

Lenka — "Trouble Is a Friend" — WATCH

Decoder Ring — "Traffic" — LISTEN

Foo Fighters — "The Pretender" — WATCH

Beck — "Lonesome Tears" — WATCH

Andrew Bird — "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left"



of Montreal — "The Party’s Crashing Us"— LISTEN

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings — "100 Days, 100 Nights" — WATCH

Spoon — "The Way We Get By" — WATCH

Goldfrapp — "Ride a White Horse" — WATCH

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — "Is This Love?" — LISTEN

Estelle (feat. Kanye West) — "American Boy" — WATCH

Jason Mraz — "I'm Yours" — LISTEN

The Strokes — "Someday" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Transatlanticism" — LISTEN

Norah Jones — "Sinkin’ Soon"



St. Vincent — "Actor out of Work" — WATCH

The Sea and Cake — "Left Side Clouded" — WATCH

OutKast — "B.O.B. — Bombs over Baghdad" — WATCH

Animal Collective — "Peacebone" — LISTEN

Sara Bareilles — "Bottle It Up" — WATCH

Jenny Lewis — "Black Sand" — LISTEN

nine inch nails — "all the love in the world" — LISTEN

The Postal Service — "We Will Become Silhouettes" — WATCH

Goldfrapp — "Monster Love" — LISTEN

TV on the Radio — "Dreams"



Ms. John Soda — "Hands" — LISTEN

The Temper Trap — "Sweet Disposition" — WATCH

Arcade Fire — "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" — WATCH

M. Ward (feat. Zooey Deschanel) — "Never Had Nobody Like You" — LISTEN

The Strokes — "Hard to Explain" — WATCH

of Montreal — "Forecast Fascist Future" — LISTEN

Rihanna — "Disturbia" — WATCH

Radiohead — "Optimistic" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Soul Meets Body" — WATCH

Bruce Springsteen — "The Rising"



MGMT — "Electric Feel" — WATCH

Sophie Ellis-Bextor — "Murder on the Dance Floor" — LISTEN

Amy Winehouse — "Rehab" — WATCH

Franz Ferdinand — "Jacqueline" — LISTEN

My Brightest Diamond — "Golden Star" — LISTEN

Green Day — "Wake Me Up When September Ends" — LISTEN

Broken Social Scene — "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl" — WATCH

St. Vincent — "Black Rainbow" — LISTEN

The Postal Service — "Brand New Colony" — LISTEN

Does it matter how much salt Mayor Bloomberg puts on his food?

The New York Times reported yesterday:

HE dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot. ...

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has become New York City’s nutritional nag, banning the use of trans fats, forcing chain restaurants to post calorie counts and exhorting diners to consume less salt. Now he is at it again, directing his wrath at sugary drinks in a new series of arresting advertisements that ask subway riders: “Are you pouring on the pounds?”

But an examination of what enters the mayoral mouth reveals that Mr. Bloomberg is an omnivore with his own glaring indulgences, many of them at odds with his own policies. And he struggles mightily to restrain his appetite. ...

[H]e is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides. ...

Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.

A health tip sheet from the mayor’s office tells New Yorkers to “drink smart” by choosing water, even though Mr. Bloomberg has a three- to four-cup-a-day coffee habit.

“I can count on two hands the number of times I have seen him drink water,” said one dining companion ...

This does seem to support Megan McArdle's theory that elites who profess concern over the supposed obesity epidemic are really just projecting their own eating disorders onto the masses.

On the other hand, I find it a little disturbing that the Bloomberg piece is even considered a news story. It reminds me of how people love to point out that Al Gore and Thomas Friedman don't do the best job of minimizing their own carbon emissions. But how does that undermine their ideas about what's in store for the planet? Whether you agree or disagree with their views on climate change, their personal habits are a distraction from the real issues.

We have clashing expectations for politicians. It's politically poisonous for them to show any enthusiasm for arugula, endives, or dijon mustard, yet they're not supposed to eat too much fast food. The article is illustrated with a photo of Bloomberg eating a slice of cheese pizza (part of a whole "slideshow" of Bloomberg eating food), but people would be more critical if the mayor of NYC didn't go around eating pizza. If he had an impeccably healthy diet, people would criticize him for being a fanatical health nut trying to impose his personal regimen on the whole city.

The Bloomberg article is currently one of the "most blogged" and "most emailed" NYT articles. Of course, part of why so many people are talking about it is that it's just funny, and it lets bloggers use headings like: "Bloomberg to NYC: 'Stop Eating All My Salt.'" But are people truly concerned about Bloomberg's hypocrisy?

I suspect we're quietly gleeful at the chance to see our elected officials show that they're flawed, human, impetuous. It might not be far off from what happened to Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Mark Sanford, et al. For some reason, we're vaguely titillated by the idea of a politician who's unable to resist temptation.

For the annals of "unconvincing Facebook alerts"

There's a Facebook application called iLike, where you can make a list of your favorite music and get alerted when one of your favorites is going to play a concert in your town. This message from iLike just arrived in my inbox:

"George Harrison posted a concert near you!"